Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
Luis moved before the possibilities of what might be wrong even registered.
The house wasn’t huge. It didn’t take him long to leave the entryway and come to a grinding halt in the doorway of the living room.
The salty night breeze swept the long white curtains that framed the back door deep into the room, partially obscuring the man who held a gun to Frankie’s head.
They stood together by the glass door, the curtains brushing their sides with every salty gust of late summer wind. For a long second, no one moved or spoke. Luis stared at Frankie with wide eyes, frozen, as Maxine skidded to a halt behind him.
The security perimeter had only been down for a minute. That was apparently all it took for a rat to slip through.
“Easton,” she breathed, voice trembling, “what… are you doing?”
“Come here, Max,” her cousin barked. He tipped his head toward the door. His left arm was wrapped around Francesca’s front and the right held the bolt gun dangerously close to her temple.
Luis didn’t move a muscle. There were guns all over the house, but none on his body.
It made Francesca uncomfortable when she accidentally brushed against it, so he’d taken to leaving it in their bedroom.
Of course, he had the knife he’d taken back from the bastard who stabbed him, but he couldn’t risk reaching for it with the business end of the gun touching her.
Speaking through lips that felt curiously numb, he demanded, “Did you bring him here?”
“No,” she gasped, staring with open horror at her sweaty, disheveled cousin. “I never—”
Easton flashed his fangs. Shifting his feet in a dangerously erratic movement, he snapped, “Max!”
“Fuck you!” Maxine’s face went from bone white to red in an instant. She moved to charge forward, her lips peeled back from her fangs and claws curled, but Luis grabbed her arm when Easton stiffened, the hand holding the gun pressing hard into Francesca’s temple.
“Stop,” he hissed. “He could kill her by accident.”
When he was certain Maxine wasn’t moving, he swallowed past the lump in his throat. “What do you want, Easton?”
The man’s face was pallid and sheened with sweat. His auburn hair stuck up in almost every direction, and it looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes in days, if not weeks. His eyes were watery and bloodshot, giving him a wild look that made Luis’s heart drop.
“I’m taking her,” he announced with a hesitant half-step toward the door.
Luis held the man’s gaze. With every ounce of quiet, deadly rage he possessed, he calmly replied, “You’re not taking my anchor. You’re not leaving. The only choice you have now is how badly you want to die.”
Maxine held up her hands. “No, this does not have to go this way.” Gesturing in the direction of her car, she pleaded, “Easton, if you drop the gun now, we can leave together. No one has to get hurt.”
“I can’t do that,” he whined before Luis could firmly explain that his leaving wasn’t, in fact, an option.
Maxine’s gaze bounced between Easton and Francesca’s pale face. “Why?”
“Because he sent me with a message, and if I don’t deliver it, he’ll kill me,” Easton explained, all stumbling syllables and spittle — the favorites of the desperate. “I’ve been following you for weeks, waiting for you to find them.”
He knew the answer already, but Luis in a bid to buy time, he still asked, “Who sent you?”
Easton tilted his scruffy chin up. The line of his sweaty neck stretched, showing off the raw, raised flesh and the blue-black tattoo of a snake it framed.
“He doesn’t want my money anymore,” he explained in that high, weaselly voice.
“He said he’ll take me apart if I don’t do this. All he wants is what you can give him.”
Luis took one step into the living room. “What’s the message, Easton?”
“Luis!” Francesca’s eyes widened half a second before a warmed barrel kissed the back of his neck. The power of the charged battery pack hummed through the delicate vertebrae like a promise of a quick, white-hot decapitation.
He stood perfectly still as some of the tension bled out of Easton’s expression.
He wore a look that was a little too close to relief for Luis’s comfort.
Ignoring the way her fingers dug into his arm, he dragged Frankie a little closer to the door.
“Don’t you fucking move,” he ordered, “or Bite’ll blow your head off. ”
“Seems like that would make delivering your message a little more difficult,” Luis replied. He kept his gaze locked on Francesca’s, half afraid that if he looked away for even a moment, she’d try something reckless that’d get her killed right before his eyes.
I didn’t even get my thirty days, he thought, every muscle in his body coiled tight with the urge to protect her. I can’t lose you now. I won’t.
But if Malachi had sent Bite to do a job… Well, it wasn’t terribly likely that he’d be the one walking away.
The man himself murmured in a silky voice, “Miss Wright, please put your back against the wall. I don’t like shooting women.”
Maxine made a soft sound of rage deep in her throat as she backed up one stilted step at a time. When her spine hit the wall, she seethed, “Both of you are fucking cowards.”
“You know you’re dead, right?” Francesca breathed. Her gaze flicked up to level a poisonous glare at her captor. “Whatever you do. Whatever happens in the next few minutes. Whatever choice you think you have, you don’t. You’re a dead man, Easton, because if my man doesn’t kill you, I will.”
Luis snagged her attention with an exasperated look. Don’t move, he silently instructed her.
A myriad of emotions passed through Francesca’s expressive eyes before they settled on the one that scared him most: defiance.
“The anchor for the witch,” Easton spat. “He knows what she means to you now, Luis. He knows that you’ll trade. You call Felix and tell him to deliver—”
Gods bless her and curse in equal measure, but his incredible, defiant, brilliant anchor chose that moment to bring the meat of Easton’s forearm to meet her blunt teeth.
It was something of a universal truth that no vampire truly thought they’d be bitten.
It just wasn’t done. Not even in the crudest, most ruthless syndicate circles would a man think to defend himself against a bite.
Under normal circumstances, it was the kiss of death to both.
The injected venom killed the bitten and the poisoned blood killed the biter.
Only the truly mad or desperate made that kind of call.
So it explained why no one seemed to expect his wily anchor to do exactly that.
Luis lunged as Easton howled a curse. The bolt gun moved off his neck.
He expected to feel the instant, searing agony of a plasma bolt, but he didn’t stop moving for a second.
He snatched Francesca around the waist and dragged her to the floor a moment before the air filled with the ozone and cooked meat scent of a bolt shot finding its target.
Which, as it happened, wasn’t him.
Easton collapsed onto the wood floor, the left half of his face missing. Behind him, a white curtain still billowed despite the hole that had been singed through it.
Maxine let out a sound that wasn’t quite a scream and lurched away from the wall. It was somewhere between that and a moan — the sound of a terrible sort of grief he’d seen played out again and again.
Cursing, Luis covered Francesca as much as he could and swiveled his head to get a good look at Bite, who hadn’t moved from his spot by the doorway. The assassin watched dispassionately as Maxine bowed over her cousin’s body.
“You fucking idiot,” she seethed, knocking the gun out of his limp hand.
Francesca squirmed beneath him. “Max,” she called out, reaching for her friend. “Oh, gods, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Forcing himself to ignore them both, Luis snatched the gun off the floor and aimed it at the man in the doorway.
“I’m not here to kill you,” Bite mildly informed him, as if he’d just stopped by to drop off a note or a bottle of synth.
Lowering his own weapon, he casually leaned a shoulder against the door jamb and crossed one expensive leather boot over the other.
Dark eyes that had seen more horror than most people could imagine glanced meaningfully down at Francesca. “I’m not here for her, either.”
Luis’s lip curled over his fangs. “You’re here for Malachi.”
“Of course I am,” he replied, “but that’s not why I shot the idiot.”
He was too busy keeping his aim on Bite to keep Francesca in place. His anchor, her mouth smeared with vampire blood once again, crawled over to her friend. Draping herself over Maxine like she could hide her from everyone, including Luis, she snarled, “Why are you here, then?”
He lifted his chin. The warm light filtering from the glass globes around the room glanced off high cheekbones and dark skin. “I need you to tell Ginny something for me.”
Luis stared down the barrel of his gun, his stomach sinking. “What?”
Standing up straight again, Bite tucked his gun into its holster. Dark eyes gleamed green in the shadow of the hallway as he took a step backward. “Time’s up.”